by Peter Cox
They were tired.
“Like an egg,” Basset said. “I like eggs. I could go for some eggs right now.”
“Orange juice?” Sam asked.
Hungry too, I guess.
“The sun.” I said finally. “Like the sun. Indoors.”
Sam slapped her forehead. That woke her up.
“An indoor sun. An electric lamp.” She rolled her eyes. “It really is the obvious things that you miss, the things right in front of your face.”
“I know,” I said. “But riddles always look more obvious once you’ve solved them.”
Basset wasn’t so easily comforted. He was a little bitter about it. “Who calls a lamp an indoor sun? That’s stupid. Even animals know how electricity works. Okay, we don’t know how it works, but we know what it is. Only wild animals don’t know that.”
I laughed. “That’s just how a riddle works I guess buddy. C’mon, let’s take a look at that lamp.”
We sprinted out the door, but not before making sure we grabbed our supplies and a couple of granola bars on the way. Growing kids need their breakfast. Especially six foot tall ones.
The excitement had returned. We were back on the trail, back on the hunt. We could do this.
We made it to my house in no time, and we ran right up to the dining room table.
“I’m with your mom on this one,” Sam said. “Ugliest freaking lamp ever.”
“Definitely,” I said, grasping it by the neck and flipping it over.
On the base, right above the center, were two holes about the size of my fingers. Below that was a thin, curved crack.
Like a face. Two eyes and a smile.
I put my fingers in the holes and gave the base a half turn so the smile was upside down.
With a click, the bottom panel popped off.
Inside the base was a tiny hidden compartment, and in the compartment was a key.
An old, rusty key with no note or any markings. But I knew what it went to.
“C’mon,” I said, snatching the key and setting the lamp down carefully (I didn’t want to have to explain a broken lamp after I’d rescued my parents, even if it did make my mom happy).
Sam and Basset exchanged a confused look, but followed me as I bounded up the stairs.
I stopped at the crawlspace door, knelt down, and slid the key into the top lock.
Perfect fit.
“What’s in there you think?” Sam asked as I removed the first lock.
“I have no idea,” I said as the second one came free. “But if the riddle is right, it’s answers.”
“Do you think it’s safe?” Sam asked just as I slid the key into the last lock.
I hesitated. Basset crawled right in front of me and did a quick sniff-check.
“All clear,” he said. “No animals, no unusual chemicals, nothing. Go for it.”
I undid the last lock, and the crawlspace door swung open.
Chapter 28
INSIDE THE CRAWLSPACE
Inside was a small room – much more than a crawlspace – with a ceiling high enough that I could stand up without bumping my head.
The floor was covered in a thick coat of dust that hadn’t been disturbed in a long time. No animal prints or footprints disturbed the surface.
The room looked ordinary enough: old musty boxes were stacked up all over the place, turning the attic into a maze.
All of a sudden we heard that fast ticking again, for just a second or two, and then silence.
“What the heck was that?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know, but I’ve heard it before. Always from in here.”
We cautiously made our way into the first corridor between the boxes, with Basset’s nose leading the way.
Sam and I switched on our flashlights and swept the aisle. There were a lot of shadowy side passages that could be hiding anything.
Or anyone.
It made me nervous, but I kept reminding myself that the dust had been undisturbed.
That only helped a little.
In the center of the aisle we found an old tattered book, lying open.
I stooped down and picked it up, reading the cover.
“A children’s grammar primer,” it said.
It was open to a page about the alphabet, with a numbered list of all the letters:
1. A
2. B
3. C
4. D
5. E
6. F
7. G
8. H
9. I
10. J
11. K
12. L
13. M
14. N
15. O
16. P
17. Q
18. R
19. S
20. T
21. U
22. V
23. W
24. X
25. Y
26. Z
All the other pages had simple poems to help kids learn to read.
Everything else up here was in boxes. It seemed odd that this book had been left out.
I scanned the boxes, and saw that my mom had been right: a lot of them were labeled “Christmas” and one even said “Aluminum Christmas Tree.” Might as well have said “tacky” right on it.
A few of the boxes had fallen over, spilling their contents out onto the ground: mostly books or old plates and silverware, but there were a few baseball cards. I’d definitely have to come back up here. You know, once my parents weren’t in mortal danger.
The ticking came back, just for a second.
“It sounds like it’s coming from over there,” I said, motioning to one of the side passages on the right.
We snuck our way over and turned the corner.
I finally saw what had been making all that ticking this whole time.
And I wished I hadn’t.
Spiders.
Thousands and thousands of scurrying spiders.
Chapter 29
THOSE WHO AWAKENED
I gasped and jumped back, bumping into Sam and bouncing right off her. I tripped and fell face down on the ground.
There was that ticking, scurrying sound again, right in front of me. I looked up; a sea of spiders rushing at my face. Just as the spiders reached me I scrambled onto my hands and knees.
I tensed up, expecting to feel hundreds of tiny, venomous fangs sink into my skin.
Instead, the spiders rushed around me, like waves breaking around a rock, and then they stopped, all their beady eyes looking up at me.
I was pretty sure I could crawl over them and squish most of them on my way to safety, but I’d definitely get bitten a bunch of times. And who knew how venomous these things were? They were awfully big and hairy.
Sam and Basset both stood back, outside the circle of spiders, probably too cautious to move out of fear that the spiders would leap at me.
Through the crowd, I saw a much larger spider approaching me. All the critters were gray, but this one looked almost stark white, with black splotches on its back. The sea of spiders parted as he walked through, all eight of his eyes staring right at me.
It was a somber, terrifying mood, which was almost instantly broken.
“Sheesh, you finally made it in here,” the big spider said. “We’ve been waiting long enough. This is important, you know. Not just a social call.”
“You can talk!” I shouted. Sam looked surprised, and Basset looked positively dumbfounded.
“Well someone’s observant,” the spider continued. “Really, spot on investigation there kid. Next thing you know, you’ll be able to figure out that I have eight legs!”
I just stared.
“But, I thought bugs and little things couldn’t talk.”
“You thought wrong.” Then the spider laughed. Yes, laughed, and it was a surprisingly friendly laugh. Not sinister and “I’m going to eat you”-toned at all. “I’m just messing with ya. C’mon back to our nest and I’ll explain everything.”
The spider turned aro
und and walked the way he had come, and all the other spiders followed, quickly disappearing into the darkness.
“What the vet?” Basset said under his breath. I’d never heard him swear before.
“What’s going on?” Sam asked.
“I don’t know,” I responded. “Spiders can apparently talk now. Weird week.”
“Oooooookay.”
“And they want us to go back to their nest so they can explain everything to us.”
“Ummmm….”
Sam wasn’t usually speechless.
She shook her head to clear it. “Do we trust them?”
“Not a chance,” Basset said.
“I’m not so sure,” I responded. “They could’ve bitten me a hundred times before I’d had the chance to blink. And he seems friendly enough.”
“Friendly? Really?” Sam asked.
“Yeah. More Charlotte’s Web than The Hobbit, I guess.”
“Well let’s see what they want,” Sam said, taking this easier than I would have thought.
She rolled with the punches a lot better than I did.
Basset looked at me cautiously.
“You keep your eyes to the rear and make sure they don’t surround us. We can make a quick escape at the first sign of trouble. Okay boy?”
“Okay,” he said, clearly still not convinced.
We made our way deeper into the shadows, making sure to watch our step for any stragglers. You don’t want to get off on the wrong foot, if you know what I mean; crushing someone’s family isn’t the best way to get a new friendship started.
Our flashlights found the nest, and I gasped out loud.
The webs glittered in the light like diamonds, stretching from floor to ceiling across the corridor, about five feet wide. The cobwebs receded backwards, layer after layer after layer, hundreds of thousands of tiny strands building a deep, almost impenetrable cloud.
It wasn’t a nest. It was a spider city.
The lead spider – I don’t know what they call them, spider kings maybe? – was waiting for us at eye level on a bridge of glistening web. He was surrounded by about 30 of his little friends, all staring me in the eye.
“Good of you to join us,” he said.
“Ummm… thanks for the invite.” I was trying to be polite, but I wasn’t an expert in spider etiquette. “My name’s Nate.”
“Yes, we are aware. We live in the same house, you know.”
“Oh, right,” was all I could muster.
“I’m William Webwood the 1,134th,” he said. “I’d bow, but we have no knees, you see. Or waists.”
“Of course,” I said, bowing myself.
“Look, I’m sure you have many questions, the lot of you. Let me start off with the most obvious: yes, we can talk. And no, we have not been keeping this a secret from you. It only started about a month ago. For generations we were little more than savage beasts, bugs scurrying to and fro with no awareness of ourselves. But then, suddenly, that all changed. It was like waking from a deep sleep, but also not like that at all. Imagine being born as an adult. One minute you’re not there, and the next minute you are.”
“Sounds like that’d take a bit of getting used to.”
“Oh believe me, it did. We’d never had consciousness, you know. Quite disconcerting. But we were not the only ones.”
“There’s more?” Basset asked. “How many? All the bugs?”
“We do not know how many of our brothers have awakened, but we know that we are not the only. And we are not the first. There is a darkness brooding out in the wider world, a darkness that we have sensed as much as seen, whispers floating in the air bringing news of destruction.”
“Sounds serious,” I said.
“Oh, quite. Believe me, we prefer not to be so glum and somber. But it’s the only way to talk about such things.”
I nodded. “Got it.”
“We heard news of your gift, of your ability to hear us. That is why we called you up here.”
“Wait, called me? What do you mean?”
“From your window. Remember? Floating face appearing in the night? Is that a common occurrence among humans?”
“That was you?”
“Who else would it have been? You know a lot of flying phantoms?”
“Well no. But how?”
“We’re quite clever,” he said. If he’d had a nose, I’m sure he would have pointed it up in pride. “We knew you’d be terrified of a few thousand spiders waking you up, so we built a puppet. You know, something you’d be a little more comfortable with.”
“Comfortable! That thing was terrifying! Why was it wearing a mask?”
“Yeah, turns out we’re not very good at making realistic human faces out of webs,” he sounded offended. “We were only born a couple days ago. Give us a little slack, would ya? You try making a realistic human face out of yarn you spit out of your butt and tell us how it goes. We’ll wait.”
“Sorry.”
“Obviously our puppet couldn’t speak, which is why we wrote our message on your window.”
“It was kind of cryptic. I know, I know, you were just born and all that. But why the vague poetry?”
“You found our school book in the corridor, correct? That is how we learned to spell. At the start, that was all we had to go on. If poems are how you teach your children how to read, we figured that was how you all talked. We assumed you were a very rhymey civilization.”
“Okay,” I said. I was trying to process all of this. It made a surprising amount of sense, but it really wasn’t what I expected. I was having a little trouble asking questions while I was still processing the answers. “So you left us clues telling us where to search. How did you know about Baskertonn Manor?”
“Whispers on the breeze my friend, whispers on the breeze. We don’t know all the details, just bits and pieces. What we know is that darkness is coming, and you are our best hope for stopping it. So we passed along whatever we heard to you.”
I passed along all this info to Sam, who, as usual, took it easily.
“That makes sense,” she said, when I was done.
“That’s news to me.”
“Well, it’s not a normal kind of sense, but it makes its own sense.”
I turned back to the spiders.
“So do you know where my parents are? Who took them?”
“We do not. Not everything. But we called you up here to promise you our help. We have always been peaceful spiders, even if the previous owner tried to hide us away in here.”
“The previous owner knew about your nest, that’s why he sealed up that door so tight? Why didn’t he just call an exterminator?”
“Wow, thanks. ‘Why didn’t he just wipe out your entire family?’ You say it so casually.”
“I’m sorry. I just mean, from his perspective.”
“He found us just days before your parents bought the house. He didn’t want to spend the money on an exterminator, but didn’t want your parents to back out of the deal because of a few thousand spiders.”
“So he shut this place up tight until the sale was final,” I nodded. “Sneaky.”
“Very.”
“So you’re offering your help,” Basset said from behind me. “I’m cautious around your kind, mostly because we haven’t had much of a chance to get to know you, but we’re happy for any help we can get. How do you propose to help us?”
“Thank you Basset,” William said. “We’ve heard that you are a reasonable, patient, and wise animal. Seems your reputation was correct.” Basset got that blushing look on his face again. “First, we can be your eyes and ears out in the wild. Without birds to peck us off, we can travel safely and swiftly all over. And we’re more trustworthy than those nasty squirrels.”
“I’m starting to like them,” Basset whispered to me.
“Second, we heard you and Basset talking about needing to read something that will provide the name of our enemy. We heard the name back in our infancy, and tried to communicate it t
o you, but we were unsuccessful. And now the name has been lost. I do not know how our message failed, but I am looking into it.”
“Thank you,” I said. “How can you help us read the card?”
“Tell me, have you ever heard of the ogre faced spider?”
I shuddered at the name.
“Oh yes, they are quite terrifying,” William said, noticing my reaction. “Deadly hunters who can jump on you from quite a distance before you’ve even noticed them. They also throw their webs like a lasso. A sticky, sticky lasso. Luckily, they don’t live this far north.”
“Then why do you mention it?” Basset asked.
“Because if anyone can help you read that card, it is an ogre faced spider. Their eyesight is legendary.”
“Doesn’t do us a lot of good if we have to go to Mexico to find one,” Basset said.
“There is one near here. Somewhere deep in the woods. Legend has it that he cast his web over a bird and rode it 3,000 miles here for a change of scenery.”
“That’s insane,” I said.
“Of course it is. He was probably brought here as a pet and released when his owner got bored of him. But the legend is so much more interesting.”
“I thought you said you were more trustworthy than squirrels,” Basset growled.
“I told you the truth. Just an interesting anecdote first. Anyway, if we can find him, he can certainly see the letters on your card. Assuming of course that he became conscious when we did. And assuming that he can read.”
“We might have to teach a spider to read,” I relayed to Sam.